Design teams can enter Rising Tides contest

Ellsworth Kelly's Stele I is found in SFMOMA's new rooftop sculpture garden. In the background: Timothy Pflueger's Pacific Telephone Building

Ellsworth Kelly's Stele I is found in SFMOMA's new rooftop sculpture garden. In the background: Timothy Pflueger's Pacific Telephone Building

Photo: Henrik Kam, Courtesy SFMOMA

Photo: Henrik Kam, Courtesy SFMOMA

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Ellsworth Kelly's Stele I is found in SFMOMA's new rooftop sculpture garden. In the background: Timothy Pflueger's Pacific Telephone Building

Ellsworth Kelly's Stele I is found in SFMOMA's new rooftop sculpture garden. In the background: Timothy Pflueger's Pacific Telephone Building

Photo: Henrik Kam, Courtesy SFMOMA

Design teams can enter Rising Tides contest

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If you harbor dreams of protecting the Bay Area from rising sea levels - and why not? - here's your chance.

Design teams can now register to enter Rising Tides, an ideas competition sponsored by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and other local agencies and advocacy groups. The goal: to "solve a meaningful sea level rise problem, while being environmentally smart, simply designed and transferable to other estuaries beyond San Francisco Bay," according to the rules at www.risingtidescompetition.com.

Priority registration closes Friday for the competition, which includes a first prize of $10,000; the deadline for entries is June 29, and there will be a public exhibition at the Ferry Building the week of July 14.

Work may be scarce these days, but there's no shortage of recognition for local architects.

Honors for residential designs also went to Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture and Lutsko Associates Landscape of San Francisco, Blasen Landscape Architecture of San Anselmo and Tom Leader Studio of Berkeley.

But wait, there's more: Leader picked up an honor award for research of an Italian archaeological site, while Oakland's Mills College was honored for its work on mapping and defining the college's architectural heritage.

The new sculpture garden at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a soft frame of polished lava perched atop an eight-level parking garage. The spacious spare space - Boston ivy already climbing two walls, sculptural gingko trees in planters of white concrete - creates a tranquil counterpoint to the clutter of towers beyond the walls.

More important, it passes the first test of true art: inducing a sense of heightened awareness that nudges us to take a fresh look around.

That, or I've been staring too long at my favorite pair of pieces in a 14,400-square-foot space designed by Jensen Architects with CMG Landscape Architecture.

There's "Stele I," Ellsworth Kelly's 18-foot high orb of weathered steel against the east wall of the garden and, maybe 10 feet to west, "Zim Zum I" by Barnett Newman - a pair of 8-foot-high folded metal panels, like staircases set on their sides, that from the garden's enclosed pavilion resemble a line of rectangles.

Then there's the installation popping up in the distance: One Rincon, the 64-story condo tower poised in controversial isolation near the Bay Bridge. It's a thin rectangle rather than a curvy orb, but there's a visual link to "Stele I" nonetheless. And if the Kelly is One Rincon, then Newman becomes a stand-in for the squat clump of older towers in the traditional Financial District.

So was that the intent of curator Gary Garrels, to present an allegorical skyline?

In the next breath, though, Garrels copped to some architectural aforethought regarding "Stele I." It reaches 4 feet above the lava wall. In the background? The revered Pacific Telephone Building, a 435-foot stroke of white terra cotta.

"I'm hoping that the Kelly piece pops up out of the wall" when viewers look at it, Garrels said. "I want our piece to pull the eye to the Pacific Telephone Building."

Earlier this year, Place was joined by a cousin column in the Sunday Chronicle (say that three times fast): Cityscape, a quick look at a single building or space that stands out amid San Francisco dense urban fabric.

Now, with the help of Chronicle synergy wiz Justin Beck, a city's worth of Cityscapes can be found at sfgate.com/maps/ cityscape. Not only will you find all the columns so far - a tour that runs the gamut from the Conservatory of Flowers to 101 California St. - but they're also sprinkled across a handy interactive map.